Two families awaken to find their little girls missing...
Calli is afraid of her father, Griff, and she knows he's in the kitchen, but she has to go to the bathroom, so she decides to sneak past, hoping that the darkness of the early hour will hide her. But he spots her, and calls her to him. He's drunk, again, and ranting about her being another man's daughter. He drags her off into the woods.
Petra is Calli's friend. She sees someone outside her window and decides to follow them into the woods.
Petra's parents wake up to find her missing. They contact the authorities, and the officer and Petra's father go to see Calli's mother, who is still asleep when they arrive and they ask to talk to Calli. Her mother finds she is also missing, and the police launch a full out search. What will happen to the little girls? What will happen to Griff? And will the parents ever find their children again?
The Weight of Silence is a beautifully detailed and deeply intriguing exploration of human emotion through the eyes of several different people involved in this story of the disappearance of these two children. The characters are so elaborate that they almost seem real. The only thing I didn't really understand was why, with these children gone and fear that their case is related to an old rape and murder case, the parents and cops spend so much energy reliving their own histories with each other- like Lou, the cop, thinking for what feels like a long time about seeing Calli's mother sledding when they were little, or why Calli's mother spends time reminiscing about her first sexual encounter while her daughter is out lost in the woods. I love the way it fills out the characters, telling us about them and their histories so that we feel like we really know them by the end of the book, but I would have liked to see them as divergences in the story itself, by an exterior narrator, rather than the characters' own thoughts- though I suppose that might be because I've never really been a fan of the first person narrator, which is used throughout this book. Despite that personal preference, this is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I will definitely keep an eye out for more novels by Ms. Gudenkauf!
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